8 moments when North Korea was weirder than the Onion

North Korea, by most accounts, is a terrible place, marred by atrocity and suffering. But as with all corrupt, reflexively repressive societies, there’s a surreal aspect to almost every bit of news that escapes the country. It’s only natural that a satirical news outlet like the Onion would latch onto the rogue nation as a fertile source of outlandish geopolitical humor—occasionally causing international confusion in the process—but the weirdest North Korea headlines have always come from North Korea itself.

What does it take for a widely hated totalitarian state to create viral bait that keeps it in the news for all the wrong reasons? North Korea might present a human rights fiasco and a legitimate threat to global stability, yet we're perpetually amused (or maybe distracted) by its apparent willingness to parody itself. That could be an accident of cross-cultural winds, though at times it feels like a deliberate pattern of deflection: as long as they keep us laughing, the regime can quietly sweep any crime under the rug.

Here are eight instances in which they must have been messing with us—though to what purpose we can't be sure.

1) “North Korea Insults John Kerry Over His Looks”

Yes, a recent dispatch from a North Korean spokesman also labeled President Barack Obama a “monkey” and South Korean President Park Geun-hye a “prostitute”—pretty ho-hum racist and misogynist burns, all things considered—but calling U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry a wolf in sheep’s clothing with a “hideous lantern jaw,” well, now you’re trolling with the best of them.

Adolf Hitler famously banned Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator in Nazi-occupied Europe but secretly watched the film twice. North Korea’s foreign ministry, apparently not quite so curious as the Führer, in June promised “merciless” retaliation over the release of The Interview, a James Franco/Seth Rogen comedy about a bumbling attempt to assassinate Kim Jong-Un.

It’s one thing to insist that your haphazardly launched rockets have nothing to do with a visit from a leader of a religious faith verboten within your borders. It’s quite another to attack him for failing to schedule that visit around a World War II liberation anniversary when you didn’t tell anyone you planned to celebrate by testing long-range weapons capable of vast destruction.

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